Video reblogged from Tyler Coates with 456 notes
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]Jesus fuck. “One above and two below.” Good lord.
There’s a lot we could say about this, even without getting into biography. Autobiography, though, is a different story. For instance, I could talk about Matthew’s distinction between 90s indie as emotionally reserved and cerebral and 00s indie as emotionally open and visceral. For me, this sorta explains why I didn’t listen to a lot of indie in the 90s. I was into “alt” acts, sure, but they were all major-label, and the acts I was into most were things like Tori Amos and Blur. Tori, after all, is the woman who once covered “Raining Blood” under the assumption that it was about a vagina raining blood on Afghanistan, so this is not really subtle, emotionally reserved stuff, you know? Whereas Britpop, for me as an American teenager, was appealing because it didn’t need to worry about American authenticity, and so could play with theatricality and archness in a way I found appealing. It was cerebral but not reserved, putting its social commentary out there blatantly and then kind of swanning around it. Tori would have taken the opposite approach, hiding the social commentary with her body as she tried to gnaw it to death. But indie wanted to turn its back on the social commentary and pretend it wasn’t there. That never really interested me, and still doesn’t, I guess, since I’m still not the biggest Pavement fan, either.
But if I learned anything from 00s indie, it’s that I liked when those impulses I was drawn to were leavened by a more cerebral mood in the culture surrounding them. The more sincere style of 00s indie was created in the context of a decade filled with fear and anxiety, and while I understand that, it’s not what I come to music for. When Tori - or Polly Jean Harvey, for that matter - put her emotions on the line, it was as a way of controlling them, and expressing mastery over the situation. 00s indie carried a tone much more of submission, or resignation, and since I come to music for triumph and energy, it never really hit me much. I engaged with indie much more in the 00s, but ultimately, it’s hard to tell if that’s because my tastes changed or because the music biz changed, and a lot of the acts I love might have been major-label alt bands in the 90s. I love the weird Brooklyn moment in the first half of the decade that produced electroclash and garage rock, and a lot of the more interesting bands that came out of it, but the tendencies since then have largely fallen flat for me.
What’s interesting about Hole is that they cycle between those two modes I liked in the 90s, going viceral for Live Through This but arch for Celebrity Skin. Courtney even embodies both impulses in this one performance, insistently screaming her anguish for “Violet” - whereas 00s indie’s tendency would be to mutter it, I feel like - and then turning arch with “He Hit Me.” It’s the kind of performance that leaves an audience speechless, and though that was a regular occurrence at Tori concerts, I don’t see a lot of that being pursued now. Which is fine! I’m always a bit out of step, and there’s more than enough stuff indie-wise around to keep me happy.
Anyway, all that said: please watch this video.
This is fantastic! This is what I’d have to show to anyone who says that anything on Live Through This doesn’t hold up. (I have that fight every now and then.)
With Matthew’s post in mind (which I enjoyed and tend to agree with), I do want to add something that I was thinking about as someone who was more into the 00s kind of indie during my emotional development. We’re talking about the emo movement of the early 00s here, obviously, and I want to focus on two bands: Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional. Conor Oberst, for me, represents the high-brow end of that genre, where Chris Carraba is most certainly the low-brow. I was a big fan of both of those bands at one point - first it was Dashboard Confessional and The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, then I moved on to Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground.
Both of those records seem kind of lame now - particularly Dashboard’s (and I know a lot of people thought they were lame then). And while I’d completely write off Dashboard Confessional now as whiny pseudo-punk music with an acoustic guitar, it’s hard for me to dismiss Bright Eyes. That record blew me away when I first heard it; I hadn’t heard anything as epic and big and with the emotional outburst that Oberst put forth in his lyrics and vocals. And while there are a lot of other dudes who have written music about their feelings before him (see: Elliott Smith, Big Star, Afghan Whigs, Dinosaur Jr., etc.), his music was the first I approached and, honestly, showed me that it was OK to be a guy and have feelings.
That’s really it, isn’t it? Isn’t it more about this idea that dudes can’t cry? They have to rock and be loud and be sexy and arrogant. It’s OK for chicks (and look! Courtney Love is trying to be a dude up there!) to be emotional and poetic, but it’s too faggy for a guy to do it. That’s really the undertone I get from every argument dismissing any emotional (/emo) music written by a man that is more vocal-based and contains a bigger, fuller sound (rather than Elliott Smith’s sparse acoustic sound; his is almost a little different because his shit was about being on drugs, really).
Also: at the end of the day, all of this is just opinion and people need to chill the fuck out, because it all comes across as a silly us vs. them argument that will obviously never end because it’s based on personal taste. Look, I like Bright Eyes and I like Pavement, and I like them pretty equally and don’t think I’d think it’s appropriate to put them head-to-head. If I’m in a shitty mood, I’m more likely to listen to “Road to Joy.” If I’m in better spirits, as I was when I was driving around the Outer Banks with the windows down and the volume way up, I’ll listen to “Gold Soundz” (and, yeah, I can sing along to “Gold Soundz”). If my mood is somewhere in the middle, I’ll listen to “Violet.”
I think the whole “boys don’t cry” thing is absolutely a huge reason why so much of early 00’s indie and emo was dismissed by people, but I also think a big part of it was a perceived immaturity, both of performer and audience, by critics and non-fans. Now there’s certainly something to be said for immature being a codeword for “unmanly” and “get over it and stop whining”, but even as a fan of both the Bright Eyes and Dashboard records you named, I have to admit that it is music made for the young, about things that happen to you when you’re young (even if it’s amazingly written, as is the case with Lifted). I feel like Ryan Adams is a male singer/songwriter who was writing music that was just as emotionally intense and filled with FEELINGS as Oberst but got a lot more initial critical respect (that he then pissed away, but still). Part of that could be because he followed the typical male rockstar actions in the press, and because he was coming from that alt-country genre, but I think some of it was due to him making music 35 year old rock critics and the NPR crowd could relate to. And when Oberst put out “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and matured in subject matter (without losing the emotional component), he got much more mainstream acceptance.
I also think the fanbase ANY act with a lot of emotional content attracts acts as cause for dismissal by a lot of people. I don’t just mean emo kids here, I’ve heard Tori Amos dismissed as “music for fat chicks and the raped” and Hole dismissed as “music for angry white girls desperate to have issues”. There’s a mainstream bias against anything with a primarily young and/or female audience (and don’t even get me started on the bias against anything with a largely gay audience) that keeps people from taking certain acts seriously and actually LISTENING to them under the auspices of “Those people don’t know what they’re talking about, they wouldn’t know good music if it smacked them in the face” that definitely impacted all the artists mentioned above unfortunately.
Source: hveasey
Video with 456 notes
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]Hole- Violet/He Hit Me… (Saturday Night Live 1994)
I had been looking for this video on Youtube to show my sister, and couldn’t find it, probably due to how SNL flags any of their content on youtube, but luckily I remembered I had downloaded it years ago and found it hidden on my external hard drive.
This is a thunderous performance of Violet, and one of the things that’s so striking about it is how none of the anger in it feels artificial or put-on. This isn’t Courtney going through the motions and playing her big hit because it keeps the crowd happy, there’s real rage and fire behind it that’s just burning her up. That moment :30 in when Courtney swings her guitar behind her and throws her leg up on the amp is perfect. This video also made me miss Melissa Auf Der Mar too. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new guys, but there’s something special about seeing Melissa throwing her body around as she plays bass and provides back-up vocals that isn’t there anymore.
The other special thing about this video is the small bit of He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) at the end. After the fury of the previous 2:45, Courtney shows some vulnerability to the audience, with a pained but powerful vocal and alternating between staring directly out in wide-eyed defiance and keeping her eyes tightly shut to the world. This thirty second snippet of the song, for me at least, expresses much more than Hole’s full cover of the song and works as a perfect coda to Violet.
Question with 7 notes
auditorylove asked: Here's a loaded question: what would you pick for your ten "desert island discs?"
Hmm, this is hard but actually not as hard as I thought it would be. They’re not in order because trying to figure that one out would probably give me a brain aneurysm.
- Tori Amos, From The Choirgirl Hotel
- Tori Amos, Boys For Pele
- Fiona Apple, When The Pawn…
- Ani Difranco, Dilate
- Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker
- Donna Summer, The Donna Summer Anthology (This is two discs, so if that’s cheating, I’ll just take disc 1)
- Madonna, Celebration (This is two discs as well, but you’ll just have to let me cheat a little because The Immaculate Collection doesn’t have Dress You Up or Burning Up.)
- Hole, Live Through This
- Liz Phair, Exile In Guyville
- Neutral Milk Hotel, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Runners-up include: Patti Smith, Horses; Alanis Morissette, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (which used to be my 3rd favorite album ever, but which has tumbled in rankings as I’ve gotten older even though I still love it); PJ Harvey- Is This Desire?; Radiohead- The Bends; Emmylou Harris- Wrecking Ball
It’s kinda weird that 7 of these albums are from the 90’s and the most recent album came out in 2000, since I do listen to a lot that isn’t from that relatively small time period. The most recent album to even come close to making it was Ys by Joanna Newsom, and only Joni Michell’s Blue and Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks were even close to getting on the list as far as pre-1980’s albums go.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]You wont remember … anything you felt … when he cuts you all alive with his bible belt.
What song is this? Never heard it…
It’s known as Bible Belt, it was performed only a few times during the Live Through This tour in 1994 but was never recorded (at least to my knowledge). Each version has slightly different lyrics so I’m not sure how much of it was a finished song vs. an improv though. Here’s a video that has 3 different versions of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwtWZEBuUWk
Source: andiwillawayyourhighness
Video reblogged from Tyler Coates with 60 notes
Hole - “Olympia”
Whenever I hear someone talk about authenticity, I think about Hole.
I remember when Hole first came out. I was a teenager. Most of my friends were in thrall to Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Although a “grunge” band fronted by a woman was appreciated on a theoretical level - we were all feminists because Kurt Cobain told us we should be feminists - Courtney Love was not the rock chick most of my dude friends wanted.
To them, she appeared to be flimsy and fake. Some guessed she was just using Kurt to become famous and that Kurt wrote all of her songs. Even worse, she seemed to be driving him to mental illness and drug abuse. While he was alive, some grudging respect was given to Courtney because our artistic god must have seen something in her. His death took away that prop: Courtney Love was a fake, no-talent whore.
Two decades on, I listen to “Olympia”, and all of that stuff seems immaterial. I remember one of my high school friends complaining that his little sister played this song on an endless loop every day after school. I can see why - I want to play this song on an endless loop!
The song is filled with hooks: the repetition of the lines “I went to school” and their attendant guitar chords; the “ay-ay-ay-ay” of “Olympia”; the “make me real/FUCK YOU/make me sick/FUCK YOU!” Listen to how Courtney’s voice cycles from humour (remember how rarely Kurt laughed?), to compassion, to ennui, to anger, to vulnerability, to sexual satisfaction (that background “yeah, yeah, yeah”). The song is incredibly simple, and yet no part repeats itself exactly. No wonder teens (particularly girl teens!), identifying with its feminine teenage frustration, could play it endlessly.
And the genius of the song is that, like Kanye, Courtney is already guessing your criticisms before you make them. The “when I went to school” line is repeated because Courtney presents them as false starts - as mistakes. And the end of the song ends to soon. Another mistake. Courtney knows you think she is a fuck-up, and she’s laughing because her “mistakes” make the song more interesting and varied than if she hadn’t made them.
They also foreground the performative aspect of the song. Courtney, being a smart feminist, knows that people - men - judge women on their ability to play the part. Kurt, whether he knew it or not, played the part of tortured genius. Courtney, as we all know, is constantly struggling to chew her way out of other people’s perceptions of herself. Lately, it’s become sad. But when it was incorporated into the structure and pleasure of “Olympia” - “You think I’m shit? I’ll show you how good shit can be!” - it becomes thrilling. And it makes many of those male contemporaries of Courtney’s that my teenage friends adored sound simple-minded in comparison. They didn’t have to fight their way through a whole load of pointless shit to create music. The shit was unfair to Courtney, but it gave her music a spine-tingling tension that still shines.
It also just boils down to this: authenticity is gossip. Courtney wasn’t authentic because she did this or slept with him. But gossip fades away. No one cares about old arguments. When they aren’t being nostalgic, what people care about in old songs is hooks and emotion. Listen to “Olympia” again, and that’s all you’ll hear: hooks and emotion.
THIS!
This analysis is spot-on, both in terms of the song and Courtney.
Source: teenageart
Video with 13 notes
Hole- Happy Ending Story (live on Radio 104.5 Philadelphia)
I believe this is the only taped full performance of Happy Ending Story, and I much prefer it over the studio version. Courtney’s vocal is more sedate, fitting the worn-out and nearly defeated tone of the lyrics better, and her yelling in the last minute sounds significantly stronger than on Nobody’s Daughter, where production fuzziness made it sound too ragged. I feel like this song is in some ways a sequel to “Dying” from Celebrity Skin, with Courtney reusing the quicksand metaphor, references to death, and hitting the same emotional beats. The yelling restores some power and saves the song from crossing into despair, which could’ve easily happened since there’s no hopefulness or anger in the song lyrically aside from in the 2nd verse, just a resigned sadness. By changing the vocal tone and DEMANDING that happy ending story instead of begging for it, as well as adding a new verse not present in the original demo, ending the song with “the battle it has just begun, he haunts me to the marrow of my grief”, Courtney lets the listener know she is trudging on and damaged but not defeated.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Courtney Love- I’ll Do Anything
Courtney has attempted to make everyone forget about the “America’s Sweetheart” album in the last few years, calling it “le disaster” and refusing to play anything from it live, and while it’s undoubtedly the worst album in her discography, there are several worthwhile tracks on it. “I’ll Do Anything” is one of my favorites for exactly the reasons Courtney now despises it: She shamelessly lifts the chords from Smells Like Teen Spirit and the “woo-hoos” from Blur’s Song 2, making it “pretentious” in Courtney’s eyes, but wonderfully meta-textual to me. Come on, ripping off Kurt on a song titled “I’ll Do Anything” is a great dig at all the Courtney haters who think he wrote her music, and both of those songs are excellent so meshing them together results in something enjoyable to listen to. Lyrically, Courtney manages to associate herself with the Statue of Liberty and Marie Antoinette, while demanding skinny white boys, big black men, and ice cream, a crazed jumble that fits with the theme/reality of someone out of control. The unfinished threat in the chorus leaves the listener to wonder just how far Courtney’s willing to go down, but the song still has enough gusto and swagger to feel fun, as opposed to desperate and lifeless, like All The Drugs or Zepelin Song (the worst thing Courtney’s ever released) from the same album. I’d love to see this song (as well as Mono, Sunset Strip, Hello and But Julien..) be revived but I doubt it’ll ever happen.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Hole- For Once In Your Life
This song has slowly but surely become my favorite off of Hole’s “Nobody’s Daughter”. When the album first came out, I was a little unsure of this track because of how the added or changed lyrics altered the song’s meaning from the demo version (originally, the line was “so what can I do?”, an expression of hopelessness and defeat, not “look what I can do”, which expresses self-confidence and two of the verses were totally different). After listening with open ears though, I realized the new lyrics fit the overall meaning of the song better and the moving and elegant instrumental helped push this song past the rest of the tracks to make this my favorite. Michael Beinhorn really outdid himself with the production on this track, with all of the instruments sounding clear and discernible even as different elements become more or less prominent, and he gives the song an epic sweep that few producers can get without becoming cheesy. The excellent drumming, with its military-esque tones, was what kept me coming back to this version initially instead of just listening to the original demo and it keeps this ballad moving at a nice tempo. The cello (by Erik Friedlander) is a beautiful accent that, along with the drums, helps gives the song some instrumental grandeur to back up the lyrics. In terms of the album’s sequencing, it’s nice to have a track that is led by other instruments (piano, drums, cello) after the preceding 6 tracks which were dominated by guitar. It makes for a good change of pace that keeps the album from sounding too similar as it heads into its last half.
I’m coming to Courtney after the other musicians, since she always gets the hype and I wanted to give some attention to the other elements of the song, but her vocal performance is stellar (I’d say 2nd best on the album behind Letter To God), with impeccable phrasing and the perfect mix of vulnerability and confidence that this song needed. At times, there’s a Dylan-esque quality to her voice (“you’ll always quit, you always did”, “but I’m still breathing” “oh, I’m forever”), which makes sense since Blood On The Tracks was one of the original inspirations/reference points for the demos this song originated from.
Lyrically, this song is also quite impressive. The opening couplet “you just don’t love me and I just don’t care, Oh I never said I would play fair” starts things off with a nice edge and immediately grabs your attention, pulling you into the relationship the song’s dealing with. The next verse is a highlight, with
I am the only perfect choice
You’ve met your match, I’ve lost my voice
And when you’re gone it gets so cold
I swear I’m too young to be this old, this old
Look what I can do
illustrating the dichotomy at the heart of the song. Courtney (she’s talked about how all her songs are about her/her life, so I’m comfortable not doing the whole “narrator” thing) knows she’s great, or can at least pretend she is, but this person makes her feel needy and insecure and she needs them to get back her confidence. The next two verses illustrate all her struggles, with “And I pierced the last hole in my arm, to gouge out the pieces of you” being a particularly evocative and memorable line, before spending a verse going into all of the flaws of the other person. Here Courtney’s trying to talk herself out of loving whoever she’s addressing (I can see a case being made for it being about Billy Corgan, but I really have no idea who the song’s about and it doesn’t really matter), before acknowledging that she’s being bitter and saying “you know what’s true and you know what’s right, oh I’m forever, just do the right thing for once in your life”, letting the person know she still believes in them and will always be there despite everything, but still admonishing and cajoling them to pick her, dammit! She acknowledges her flaws one last time (“I know that I’m a hungry lost girl”) before the final line (“but please stick around, and I’ll build you a world”), with the repetitions of “I’ll build you a world” ending the song on a confident, rather than pleading, note. In the arc of the album, this song leads into “Letter To God”, Courtney at her lowest, so its obvious the person didn’t stick around, and this song represents the beginning of the downward spiral that she has to pull herself out of by album’s end with “Dirty Girls” and “Never Go Hungry Again”.
People hate her, they really do. Did you know that to Yoko someone is a verb in America? It is something that boys say if they’re hanging out with you too much and they’re going to school or they have a band. It’s almost a myth that’s used to suppress women. Y’know, ‘You’re gonna Yoko me. You’re gonna destroy me.’ And this woman put up with racial inequality from Fleet Street, she put up with being accused of breaking up the best band in the world, she put up with people’s idea that she castrated this man and then, worst of all, she had her best friend, her husband, the person she lived for, die in her arms in front of a fortress that she’d hidden herself in for 20 years. And I just feel that the world media should apologise to her because she handled it with so much dignity.
Courtney Love on Yoko Ono, 1993 (via myboylollipop) (via missworld)
I’m not a huge Yoko Ono fan (Fluxus art really isn’t my thing, although that dance song she did a few years ago was pretty good) but let’s not forget she also had to suffer the indignity of being an artist with a lot of talent and ideas who can never have their work looked at fairly because of who they dated. And how much it must suck to have that work totally overshadowed by the public persona you have, whether you want/deserve that persona or not.
Hmm, I wonder who else that could apply to?
mtv news covers hole/marilyn manson tour 1999
“when we’re done some fucking guy with a blue head is gonna come on with a big sign that says DRUGS” - CLC
I enjoyed every moment of this earnest and hard-hitting report. I should be honest and admit that it made me ever so slightly sad that I never went through a Marilyn Manson phase.
You know, it’s funny that there’s been so much drama in Courtney’s life that this whole thing has been entirely forgotten. Her pretending not to know Rose McGowan was pretty hysterical, although Courtney attacking anyone for drug use is a little ridiculous (although this was a time she was clean, so it’s not as bad as if she’d done it in 95 or 04).
This video also makes me wonder if John Norris and Marilyn Manson ever fucked. Their body language is pretty ridiculous.
Photo reblogged from with 47 notes
(via lalaureny)
Wow, I never noticed this before. That’s pretty kick-ass, especially when you think about how it was paired with the babydoll dresses to evoke childhood and innocence and then how Hole demolished the idea of being a “good girl” and all that bs.
Source: tinyrosebud
Photo with 3 notes
I should not be allowed in Waterloo Records or Book People. That I only spent around $250 today is a small miracle.
A few notes about some of my purchases:
* The Peter, Paul, and Mary record is a gift for my mother. When my sister and I were kids, if we were bad in the car, my mother would crank up some Peter, Paul, and Mary and sing along. If you ever heard my mother sing, you’d agree this is the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment. I think waterboarding would be less painful. I basically just bought her the equivalent of a new taser to use on my sister AND it was only 99 cents.
* I have been searching for that Nine Inch Nails Fixed EP for the last 8 years. I had actually given up on finding a hard copy of it a while back so it was a pleasant surprise.
* Also a nice surprise was finding the Violet single, with He Hit Me and Whose Porno You Burn as the b-sides. It was only 2 bucks which makes me think Waterloo didn’t realize what they had. (especially since that Florence and the Machine single was NINE DOLLARS!)
* The Space Dog graphic novel was only bought because of the Tori Amos song of the same name, but it’s actually quite good.
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